A major problem faced in electronics today is providing efficient heat dissipation for high performance electronic devices and systems including, but not limited to, sensors, integrated circuit boards, semiconductor chips, memory, microprocessors, cellular phones, ultra mobile personal computers (“UMPCs”), notebook personal computers, desktop personal computers, and blade servers, especially when space constraints are imposed in such applications. As additional features are added to such systems and devices, such features consume more power, while the systems and devices become smaller and thinner and generally have more limited size and space constraints. As a result, the power density of such systems and devices increase, resulting in significant temperature increases, which may lead to a deterioration of the performance and/or reliability of the system or device, as well as the overall user experience.
Fans, blowers and heat sinks are typically used in such applications to dissipate heat. However, there is no fan, blower or heat sink technology available which presently fulfills the performance, size and space limitations of today's increasingly smaller systems and devices. In fact, the performance of current fans or blowers generally significantly decreases as z-height decreases. To date, options for cooling electronic systems and devices with ever decreasing geometries have been very limited, and have presented significant challenges to designers of electronic systems and devices due, in large part, to the limited capability of known convection cooling technologies. Thus, the design of such systems and devices has been greatly limited as: i) the functionality and features for a given system or device has increased; and ii) the overall size and shape of such systems and devices has decreased.
Conventional smart phone technologies rely upon only natural convection and conductive heat dispersion for cooling. Handheld PC's rely on either natural convection/conduction, or on relatively weak convection. In both instances, practical design, performance and functionally are greatly limited by the cooling capacity of such systems and devices.